Meet the Indian warriors who watch hours of beheadings, murders & gory content to clean the internet

Sharanya's new job went from being a dream one to a nightmare in just 90 days. When she joined as a content moderator for a Hyderabad based firm in 2012, her job description was simple: sift through the content posted by users on clients' portals and social media channels weed out the trash. What she was not prepared for was an avalanche of disturbing videos -- especially many featuring child abuse.

Soon, Sharanya, (name changed), lost sleep and appetite. She was haunted by recurring nightmares of children being molested. One morning, she woke up in tears and quit her job.

And then, there is Chandan Kumar Nayak, who never thought he would make a career out of content moderation but recalls being disturbed by the many offensive posts on social media site Orkut a decade ago. When his friends told him about content moderation jobs, Chandan was intrigued and for the past five years, he has been working as a team lead at Bengaluru-based Foiwe Info Global Solutions which offers content moderation services for a variety of clients from social media companies to global dating sites to e-commerce marketplaces. "I thoroughly enjoy my job," says Nayak. "I never get overwhelmed by the sensitive content. My mind treats it as an opportunity to help clean the internet and make it a better place for others."

Both Sharanya and Nayak are a part of the small but booming content moderation business in India. From metropolises like Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai to small lanes in Jaipur, thousands of men and women aged, between 18 to 28 years, sit in front of computers looking at graphic content ranging from brutal murders, rapes, beheadings, nude pictures, abusive posts, racist videos etc that are posted on portals of their websites and social media channels. They are paid anywhere between Rs. 1.5 lakhs to Rs. 5.6 lakhs per annum.

We are here to clean the dirt from the internet. We help build better brands for our clientsAravind Rao, Co-Founder & COO, Infoesearch

"We are here to clean the dirt from the internet. We help build better brands for our clients," says Aravind Rao, Co-Founder & COO at Hyderabad based Infoesearch, who has been in the content moderation business for the last five years.

Debarati Halder, MD,Centre for Cyber Victim Counselling cites the example of two college students, both in their late teens, who had taken up content moderation jobs. "In the first few months, they saw more than 1 lakh videos of graphic content including videos, rape and molestation," says Halder. "The boys became averse to sexual relationships," she adds.

"Even though many moderators might enjoy their work, it's bound to take a toll on their mental health," says Dr Shyam Bhat, psychiatrist and founder of Seraniti, a Bengaluru based mental health service provider.

Rao says his firm Infoesearch regularly conduct sessions about the nature of the work. "We do not allow women who recently joined to moderate extreme violent content. We sensitize our employees slowly," says Rao. Similarly Suman Howladar, Founder, Foiwe Info Global Solutions says that employees are not pushed to screen violent content from the word go but are put through a two week training process sensitising them about the scope of work. "We give gruesome content to only certain people in the organization and in case they have issues, our HR helps puts them in less sensitive projects," says Howladar.

Citing another instance, Howladar's team recently tried to block lot of users on one of the largest dating sites in the world. He explained how many users would create multiple profiles and target women. "These scammers would target other users, ask money from them for air tickets or transfer to mobile wallets. To identify them, the moderators go though the user behaviour as these scammers approaches multiple individuals at the same time and have same pattern of conversations."

Another challenge that content moderators grapple on a regular basis is the ambiguous standards that vary from country to country. "The concept of racism and nudity varies from client to client and even countries. What may sound abusive to Indians may not be true to Europeans," says Rao.

For instance, clients from India are skittish about any form of nudity while a dating platform in the US is okay with partial nudity, where a user covers his or her private parts with hands. "Clients from Middle East and India would not accept a lady with hot pants whereas in US and Europe, many clients are okay with certain form of skin show but not at the cost of full frontal nude videos or pictures," says Howladar.

Racism is another challenge that these content moderation firms constantly face. Rao recalls how his team helped an online publication in US point out and remove terms like "Obama is a nigga" from their comments section and blocked the user who was constantly using the term. The client told us that criticizing a particular statesman for his policies is okay but abusing their ethnicity is not."

Graphic content moderation is just one part of the job. E-commerce platforms employ content moderation companies to flag and remove "abusive or racist products" posted for sale on their websites.

"We do not allow campaigns like t-shirt quotes or pictures which promote hatred against sexual orientation, joining hate groups, frontal nude pictures, flags of terrorist organizations, false claims," says Apurv Agrawal, founder, SquadRun which has operations in San Francisco and Delhi. "At the same time, a picture promoting legalizing marijuana is okay as it promotes a point of view."

But even product moderation has its sensitivities. "National flags imprinted on products and apparels are accepted outside and part of the day-to-day lifestyle...doormats of US Flag, or shirts of United Kingdom flags. However, it's strictly prohibited on Indian marketplaces."

Interestingly, Agrawal and his team combine artificial intelligence and a workforce of around 75,000 on a single enterprise SaaS platform to drive moderation for leading commerce companies like Sephora, Flipkart and Offerup. "We even have an app wherein users from across the world can log in and do content moderation. It's like the Uber model where we don't hire but rent out work," he adds.